


loneliness calls

by nonbinarywithaknife (littleboxes)



Series: dimension 20 [68]
Category: Dimension 20 (Web Series)
Genre: Blackouts, Campaign 03: The Unsleeping City, Divorce, Drinking to Cope, Gen, Heavy Drinking, Pre-Canon, Regret, bonding in an alley at two am
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-27
Updated: 2020-08-27
Packaged: 2021-03-06 20:46:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,269
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26145097
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/littleboxes/pseuds/nonbinarywithaknife
Summary: if you can't trust a blackout drunk woman lying in an alley with your darkest secrets and greatest shames, who can you trust?
Relationships: Sofia Bicicleta & Bruce "Kugrash" Kugrich
Series: dimension 20 [68]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1706107
Comments: 9
Kudos: 58





	loneliness calls

**Author's Note:**

> for some reason it's very hard to write the tuc gang but im just Thinking about how sofia and kugrash have met before and i love them <3  
> title is from i wanna dance with somebody by whitney houston  
> i am. so sorry about kugrash's voice and sofia's accent. it didn't read good without them but also i don't generally type out accents so i. tried. i hope it isn't too horrible

It’s somewhere around two in the morning when Kugrash is finishing up his rounds for the night, when he hears the familiar sounds of a person shifting around in an alley. The groan comes from behind some bar so dingy the name is illegible, and hefts his staff as he crawls over the trash bags, swearing quietly to himself.

He can see the shape of the person who's splayed out in the alley, and he’s a little impressed they got so far in while so clearly fuckin' hammered, given how cluttered the actual ground is with broken crates, dumpsters, and overfull trash bags just thrown haphazardly in this direction.

“Hey, are you uh, good? I mean obviously fuckin' not but you aren’t _dead_ , are you, 'cause that’s gonna suck,” he calls out, and the person responds with what sounds like sobbing.

Ah, fuck. He’s not great at comforting the crying ones. Two foot tall rat men covered in something that probably can only be quantified as goo at this point aren’t exactly _reassuring_.

The sobbing pauses for a second, and as he reaches them, he sees why- a bottle, almost empty but not quite, that hits the pavement with a clang. There are a bunch of coronita bottles surrounding it. Woof.

“Heeeeey, hey hey hey whatcha doin' down here, it’s fuckin' two in the morning, come here,” he says, and there’s no way he’s gonna be able to move her, especially when she makes no attempt to move- can she hear him?- so he pulls out a blanket and drapes it over the woman who’s already reaching for the bottle again.

Her hair looks like something he’d sleep in, which is unfortunate, and her mascara is running like hell. He goes to ask her name, but she starts talking before he can get the words out.

“I just- I miss 'im so much, you know? And I know, I was fuckin', _askin'_ for it, marryin' outta the fuckin' _neighborhood_ , but the neighborhood is fuckin' bullshit! Daleee,” she cries, and then she starts actually crying again, and Kugrash sighs and sits down. He's definitely gonna have to pull some glass out of his tail later.

“So my name's Kugrash, not Dale, but I'm sorry about him-?"

“Dale, he was- such a, a beautiful _soul_ , you know? You shoulda seen 'im, when he had all ‘is, fuckin, numbers shit, he was _glowin'_ , and I felt _whole_ when I was with 'im, you know? But I guess it was all a _fuckin' lie_ , and sometimes I get so _mad_ , and it’s like, like, how long was Isabella fuckin' _succubus_ Infierno even _there_ like even in the _picture_ and no matter how many christmas presents I buy he's not coming back but I _just_ -”

Kugrash sits with who he eventually learns is Sofia Lee (Bikes?) in a slowly dampening alley as she tells him about Dale, who is- was? her husband, and Isabella Infierno, who is a succubus? and Kugrash honestly can’t tell if she actually is or not and somehow it feels rude to ask and even when he still tries to because that feels like something he should know, there isn’t really room to get words in, because Sofia has the ability to continue speaking as she drinks, and she tells him how beautiful the deer in their backyard were, and then an hour’s passed and Kugrash knows more deer-specific adjectives than he’s ever known in his life, and soon enough Sofia seems to have finally tired herself out.

She lasted longer than he’d thought she would in semi-understandable conversation, given he’s practically getting a contact high off the vodka fumes, and then she turns to look at him, smeared mascara making her eyes look huge.

"What about you huh, you seem like a fuckin', a real _swell_ guy- _god_ , Dale used to say swell, about the deer’s little _noses_... did you have a Dale? Everbody should have a Dale, except me, because my Dale _left_... but _you_ , I mean, maybe you'd have a little rat husband, are you the only talking rat, oh _god_ , that would be so _sad_ , but you- you’re a real, a real _catch_ , you even brought-”

The rest of whatever she said is lost in the sound of her vomiting, and Kugrash is left alone with the ever present pool of shame that burns whenever his chats with Wally come to an end, or he makes the rare mistake of detouring to David’s neighborhood.

He doesn’t like thinking about Amelia, because he doesn't deserve to remember the good days. The way she'd smiled when they met the first time, how she'd curl her hair that particular way on _good days, it's gonna be a good day today Bruce, I feel it_ , and how Wally has her sunshine and David has her smarts, and really everything good in them came from her, and then it usually spirals into her face after everything he’d done had come crashing down on his life and the lives around him, and how he’d finally pushed a woman who’d been willing to try marriage counseling with _B_ _ruce Kugrich_ \- admittedly for Wally and David’s sakes more than his- into anger so vicious he still feels the sting of it- _deserved_ \- still feels the fury as she'd slammed down the divorce papers, decades later.

He knows it’s selfish, because he’d fucked up her life so badly even before he’d found out, but she’d thinned her lips and looked away when he didn’t come home for days and she'd had to handle Wally's hopeful questions and David's already frowning awareness that his dad was doing something wrong, and then she'd had to distract the boys when he brought his _work friends_ home with him, when they took over the living room for the night, and-

He was a piece of shit, and he doesn’t blame her, for changing her name, for distancing herself from everything to do with him aside from Wally and David. 

Kugrash closes his mouth and realizes that Sofia’s been asleep this whole time, gently snoring and cradling the bottle of vodka to her chest with one arm, and he shakes his head. Pulls the blanket up a little higher, and ties the bags around her feet.

He goes to get up, and feels a surprisingly muscled arm around wrap around his torso and then he, alongside the now empty vodka bottle, is being held against Sofia's side, and she mumbles a slurred, _Just five more minutes Dale_ , and Kugrash sighs. Curls up as best he can, and doesn't sleep. He keeps watch over Sofia Bicicleta Lee until the sun starts to come up and she begins to stir, and then he scampers carefully out of her loosened arm, into the sewers.

A few weeks later, when he’s at the riverside again and sees a familiar head of hair slumped against a dumpster, he heads over and she asks him if he’s real and he says _yeah_ , _I'm a fuckin' rat man_ , and she brokenly tells him the story of her last name and her horrible amazing ex-husband, and despite having had this conversation before his responses aren’t much more charismatic the second time around, and he ties the bags around her feet again- she’s gonna run out of shoes at this rate- and hands her an egg sandwich in surprisingly good condition from his bag.

This time, he leaves her awake, if probably still a little drunk from last night or technically yesterday? and she gives him a wobbly kinda wave from the alley as he drops into the sewers.


End file.
